By H.P. LovecraftEdited with an afterword and notes by S.T. Joshi

From the Back Cover and the Afterword

“I know how you wove the spell that brooded outside the years and fastened on your double
and descendant; I know how you drew him into the past and got him to raise you up from your
detestable grave; I know how he kept you hidden in his laboratory while you studied modern
things and roved abroad as a vampire by night; . . . . I know what you
resolved to do when he balked at your monstrous rifling of the world’s tombs, and at
what you planned afterward, and I know how you did it.”

It is certainly a pity that Lovecraft made no efforts to prepare Charles Dexter Ward for
publication, even when book publishers in the 1930s were specifically asking for a novel from
his pen; Lovecraft judged the novel to be an inferior piece of work, a “cumbrous, creaking
bit of self-conscious antiquarianism.” It has certainly now been acknowledged as one of
his finest works, and it emphasizes the message of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath all
over again: Lovecraft is who he is because of his birth and upbringing as a New England Yankee.
The need to root his work in his native soil became more and more clear to him as time went on,
and it led to his gradual transformation of all New England into a locus of both wonder and
terror.